Why is RSpec so slow under Rails?

Question

Whenever I run rspec tests for my Rails application it takes forever and a day of overhead before it actually starts running tests. Why is rspec so slow? Is there a way to

Answer 1

Why is rspec so slow? because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.

Is there a way to speed up Rails' initial load you could try using mocks instead of relying on the database, this is actually correct for unit testing and will definitly speed up your unit tests. Additionnaly using the spec server as mentionned by @Scott Matthewman can help, same with the autotest from zentest mentionned by @Marc-Andre Lafortune

Is there a way to single out the part of my Rails app I need (e.g. ActiveRecord stuff only) so it doesn't load absolutely everything to run a few tests? what about this

rake test:recent 

I am not sure how the rspec task integrate with this but you could definitely use the test:recent task as a template to do the same with rspec tests if the.

rake test:rspec:recent

doesn't exist yet